In defense of truth

Gun lovers worry me because they’re hypersensitive about their beloved guns and tend to fly into indignant rage when guns are linked to murders.

Well, that’s too bad.

My earlier entry about the shooting at Virginia Tech brought out some comments and e-mails, all of them jumping to bad conclusions based on what I had written. Rather than let the gun lovers go around steaming over non-existent indignities, here’s what was written and here’s how they reacted.

I wrote that school shootings hurt us as a society more any other type of mass murder situation. Only a pair of them cared much about that. They were more interested in phantom commentary that I didn’t make.

I wrote that guns make killers more efficient. This is a fact that can’t be argued. One man with 16 bullets can kill 16 people in a matter of seconds. Try that with a pool cue or a knife.

A couple of readers were upset and complained that At Large was capitalizing on a tragedy. If I was selling ad space or peddling body armor to college students, I would be capitalizing on it. Since my job is to write about news, then it’s not “capitalizing” any more than a blog about cascarones would be considered “capitalizing” on Fiesta.

Others tried and failed to make the point that a tirade against guns was a political argument. Again, there’s nothing there to support that. Politics and politicians weren’t mentioned, unless you attach “gun nuts” (This was a bad choice of words and unfairly characterizes legal gun owners. I regret the use of the term, I apologize for using the term, and won’t do it again.)to a particular party. If you do, you do so with your own prejudices.

Most readers complained about my stand proposing gun control. The only trouble with that argument is that I didn’t write that. I didn’t suggest, write, argue, pray or otherwise propose that guns should be outlawed. I didn’t demand gun control legislation. You guys are just flat out wrong.

In the world of the Internet, that’s a technique called a “blimp,” which stems from an old joke about trying to divert attention by pointing out an imaginary blimp in the sky.

That’s what the gun owners are trying to do. They want to blimp this into a Second Amendment argument to make sure no one points out that guns — like the guns that they love so much — were used to kill people. That’s the “hypersensitive” thing I wrote about above.

Here are the facts for the critics: You like guns. And you are allowed, under the U.S. Constitution, to own guns. Guns were used today to kill 31 innocent people on the Virginia Tech campus. You didn’t kill anyone. But someone with guns did and they used guns to do the killing. All of that is accurate, isn’t it? If so, just deal with it and don’t get angry when someone points it out.

I can understand the bunker mentality of gun owners when news like this breaks. But it doesn’t do any good to kill the messenger.

My mid-day blog wasn’t a gun control message; it was anger over the fact that guns once again facilitated a mass murder.